A roofer in Glen Carbon showed me his phone last month. His nephew had asked ChatGPT for a hail-damage contractor in Madison County, and the answer named three companies. His was not one of them. Two years of paying for SEO, page one for "roof repair Glen Carbon," and none of it inside the answer his nephew read.
That conversation happens about once a week now. An owner reads a headline about search dying, checks an AI assistant for their own service and town, and finds a blank where their name should be. Then comes panic, or a decision to stop paying for the website. So here are the measured numbers, and the opening sitting unclaimed in Edwardsville, Troy and Collinsville.
Is SEO dead? No, and Google's own numbers point the other way
SEO is not dead: Google search volume reached an all-time high in 2026 and organic search still accounts for roughly 25% of all website traffic, while AI assistants send about 1%. Alphabet has told investors the same thing on recent earnings calls.
What did change is the click. SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb clickstream data found 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click between January and April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024. Pew Research found people clicked a result on 8% of searches carrying an AI summary, against 15% without one. Demand held steady, click yield fell, and the drop concentrates in one place I will get to.
Hold onto that 1% when someone tries to sell you an "AI visibility package." Being cited by an AI answer buys a brand impression. Price it like one.
What SEO is, stated plainly
SEO is the work of making your pages crawlable, indexed, relevant to a real search, and credible enough that Google shows them to someone nearby with a problem you fix. That is the whole job.
For a local service business it splits three ways: a technical floor where pages load and stay indexable, a dedicated page for each service, and off-site facts like your Google Business Profile category, hours and reviews. Whitespark's 2026 survey of 47 local search experts ranked the dedicated service page as the top driver of local organic results.
The map pack and local organic are different contests. The pack turns on GBP category and proximity, so you will not rank a Glen Carbon shop in the Belleville map pack. Local organic has no proximity gate, which is why a service-by-town page set works.
I wrote up the pieces every local site needs to earn a call if yours is one page with a phone number and a photo gallery.
What GEO is, and where the term came from
GEO, generative engine optimization, is the practice of structuring content so an AI answer engine can lift a specific passage from your page and attribute it to you. The term comes from a 2023 paper by researchers at Princeton and IIT Delhi (Aggarwal et al., arXiv 2311.09735).
Classic SEO competes for a position in a list of ten blue links. GEO competes for a sentence inside a synthesized paragraph. The unit of optimization moves from the page to the passage.
A page about sump pump replacement can bury the price range in paragraph nine and still rank in classic search. A model answering "how much does sump pump replacement cost in Illinois" wants a clean, self-contained sentence it can lift, so paragraph nine loses to paragraph one.
Be skeptical of anyone quoting that paper's headline percentage as current data. It measured GPT-3.5 over a 2023 retrieval.
How AI answer engines choose who to cite
AI answer engines retrieve candidate pages, break your query into sub-questions, and lift the passages that most directly answer each sub-question in plain, self-contained language. Four measured patterns fall out of that.
Position on the page matters. Kevin Indig's February 2026 analysis isolated 18,012 verified ChatGPT citations and traced them back to source sentences: 44.2% came from the first 30% of the page.
Question-shaped headings matter. Ahrefs found pages with question marks in their headings were cited at 18% versus 8.9% for pages without. The model treats an H2 as the user's question and the paragraph under it as the answer.
Freshness matters, but not the way people assume. Seer Interactive dated 7,683 cited pages: 75% had been updated within the past year, only 42% published within it. Updating an existing service page beats publishing a new one.
Brand mentions outweigh links. Ahrefs correlated 75,000 brands: branded web mentions tracked AI visibility at 0.664 against 0.218 for backlinks. A mention in the Edwardsville Intelligencer or a chamber writeup carries more weight than chasing links.
Why classic SEO is the foundation that feeds AI answers
Classic SEO is the foundation because an AI answer can only cite a page that already qualifies for ordinary Google Search. Google's documentation says a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet," with "no additional technical requirements."
The correlation data agrees. Semrush found 43.2% of pages ranking first in Google get cited by ChatGPT, roughly 3.5 times the rate of pages ranking outside the top 20. The AI layer is reading the same web your SEO already feeds.
Honest counterweight: Ahrefs measured 76.10% of AI Overview citations coming from top-10 pages in July 2025, falling to about 38% by March 2026. Ranking third no longer guarantees being quoted.
Two things sold as GEO deliverables are worth nothing. Ahrefs tested 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD schema against 4,000 controls and found no citation lift. And 97% of valid llms.txt files received zero requests in May 2026. Keep schema for rich results. Skip llms.txt.
The searches that earn you a phone call are the least disrupted
AI Overviews have taken over informational queries and have barely touched the transactional ones that produce work. Whitespark tested 540 queries in May 2025: local-intent queries triggered an AI Overview 15% of the time and a local pack 93%, while informational queries triggered one 92% of the time and a pack 6%. Google puts summaries on "what should I look for" and pulls them off "book now."
I pulled live results from Edwardsville on July 30, 2026. Three service searches, "plumber edwardsville il," "ac repair near me," and "water heater replacement edwardsville il," returned zero AI Overviews between them. All three showed a full three-result map pack, led by shops with deep review counts: Heritage Heating & Cooling at 4.9 stars on 181 reviews.
The organic results under that map pack are the part most owners never look at. That same "ac repair near me" search returned eight of ten organic results that were town-specific URLs: /locations/edwardsville-il/, /ac-repair-edwardsville-il/. Google rewrote "near me" into "Edwardsville." The page that wins a near-me search is a service-and-town page. Nobody wins it by targeting the phrase "near me."
The keyword tools point the same direction. When I pulled volumes that day, "generative engine optimization" returned no data at all, while "ai overviews" showed 880 monthly searches in the St. Louis DMA against 110,000 nationally. The panic is a national conversation. Your customers are searching for a water heater.
What a local owner should do differently now
Start by rewriting the first two sentences of every service page so they answer the heading completely, then fix the business facts that live off your website. In order:
- Google Business Profile accuracy. Primary category, hours, service area, address, phone. Gemini grounds its answers on Maps, and its share of AI assistant traffic roughly tripled in a year.
- Review velocity and rating. SOCi found AI-recommended locations averaged 4.3 stars against 3.9 for locations not recommended. Reviews are also the second-heaviest map pack factor.
- Answer-first page structure. Turn each H2 into a question a customer asks out loud, then answer it in the first sentence beneath, in the top third of the page.
- Entity consistency across directories. Same name, address and phone on Yelp, BBB, Angi and Bing Places. ChatGPT's local business facts were about 68% accurate in SOCi's testing, and inconsistent listings are why.
- A quarterly refresh, not a content treadmill. Update existing service and town pages with new prices, photos and specifics.
- Off-site mentions in the Metro East. Chamber directories, local news, supplier dealer pages, community threads.
Items one, two and four are the same work classic local SEO always prescribed. The highest-return AI work and the highest-return SEO work overlap almost entirely. My post on the mistakes costing Metro East businesses leads covers the basics I see dropped most, and the maintenance post covers the quarterly cadence.
Why nobody in your market has adjusted yet
Almost no local business in the Metro East has restructured a page for answer extraction, because the pressure has not reached these owners and the payoff is invisible from outside. So nobody moves.
Consumer behavior moved faster than owner behavior. BrightLocal's 2026 survey found 45% of US consumers used AI to find local services in the past twelve months, up from 6% a year earlier, rising to 64% among people aged 30 to 44. Those are homeowners with failing water heaters. But 52% still start on Google Search against 8% on AI tools, and only 2% acted on an AI recommendation alone.
So the realistic value of getting this right is defense. When an assistant does name businesses for "best dog trainer near Collinsville," you are in the list with correct hours and a working phone. When someone gets your name from ChatGPT and checks Google, your reviews close the loop. Structural work compounds, which makes this a 2026 job rather than a 2027 one.
Where to start this week
Pick your three highest-value service pages and rewrite the opening sentence under each heading so it answers that heading on its own, then verify your Google Business Profile category, hours and phone.
Nothing about your job changed. What changed is that vagueness costs more. A page reading "we provide quality HVAC services throughout the Metro East area" gives an answer engine nothing to lift and a homeowner in Troy no reason to call. A page opening with "AC repair in Troy, IL runs $180 to $650 for most residential calls" gives both of them something to work with.
If you would rather see a full page set built out first, LocalCraft Digital offers a free build: Get a free build.
Write like the clearest source on one specific question your customers ask, in one specific place. That was good advice in 2015. It is worth more now.